This invention relates to a character recognition system, and more particularly to a character recognition system for classifying kanji characters into large groups utilizing the information of peripheral portions of each kanji character.
In Japan where a combined sentence of kanjis and hiraganas is used in everyday language, development of a kanji recognition apparatus is indispensable. Although, in the prior art, various types of devices are known as usable for the character read-out, the number of characters capable of being read out by such devices is on the order of 100 at most (digits, alphabetic characters or marks) and kanji character recognition is impossible. It is said that the difficulties of performing the kanji character recognition operation lie in the respects that a great number of different kanji characters as well as a number of kanji characters having a complicated pattern. It is considered, however, that if such kanji characters are able to be classified in some way or other into large groups, the above problem arising from the wide variety in kanji character type will be settled. However, the complicated pattern of kanji character is large in number and contains a lot of noise components. Accordingly, there arises the problem that the kanji character recognition operation is rendered disorderly due to such noises to render the classification operation difficult, and a satisfactory method has not yet been proposed which enables classification of kanji characters into large groups.